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An alternative vision of librarianship: James Danky and the sociocultural politics of collection development
Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Juris Dilevko
DEBATES IN LIBRARIANSHIP ABOUT COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
Danky's views about collection development were grounded in the social activism of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time when "hundreds of American librarians and library school students became involved in championing socially related change in librarianship ... and in so doing brought the library profession into the social protest movements of the time" (Bundy & Stielow, 1987, p. 1). Discouraged with what they perceived as an ossified American Library Association (ALA) and with library leaders who retained "comfortable illusions" about the profession, many practitioners worked "to make good [librarianship's] intellectual freedom and other ethical commitments, to recognize and do something about the inequalities in [library] services, to withhold ... support from still segregated library associations, and to take a position on ... the war in Vietnam and police repression at home" (Bundy & Stielow, 1987, p. 5). One area of concerted effort was women's rights: 'Women librarians became aware of the wide spectrum of ideas being addressed by the women's movement and began to discuss such issues as salaries, promotional opportunities, and sexism in library materials" (Cassell, 1987, p. 21). Other areas of focus were: serving minority populations and the disadvantaged; heightening the relevancy of library education; and integrating library schools and the profession as a whole (Axam, 1987; Haro, 1987; Josey, 1987; Owens, 1987; Williams, 1987).
Some of these concerns were summarized in the "Friday the 13th Manifesto," an outgrowth of the 1969 Institute on Library Service to the Black and Urban Poor, which stated that the priorities of public libraries were skewed toward "the articulated needs and demands of the power structure and have not extended to the unarticulated needs of those outside the power structure" (qtd. in Bundy & Stielow, 1987, pp. 186-187). Librarians therefore needed to engage in "a philosophy of advocacy" on behalf of the excluded (qtd. in Bundy & Stielow, 1987, pp. 186-187). This mindset animated the founders of the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), which from its inception in 1969 saw itself as "the 'conscience of ALA' and as a pressure group within ALA" whose mission it was to engage the ALA in "intellectual confrontations" so as "to define the role of the library in society" (qtd. in Bundy & Stielow, 1987, p. 193). As Toni Samek (2001) shows, SRRT soon became "the largest ALA round table with 1013 members," an indication of widespread frustration with current practices of the ALA (p. 70).
Perhaps the most searing confrontation was about intellectual freedom. If libraries were to better serve individuals outside the power structure, they should collect materials that reflected those hitherto excluded voices. Libraries could no longer afford to be neutral in a "hands-off liberalism" sort of way, since such neutrality was not substantive neutrality (Samek, 2001, p. 46). Intellectual freedom was therefore a collection-development issue. As Sanford Berman (1976) argued, if libraries wanted to be venues for "liberation"--the "single keyword or rubric [that] encompasses the multitude of overlapping movements and ideas that within the past decade have forcefully emerged among blacks, students, Jews, teachers, Chicanos, women, the young, Asian-Americans, servicemen, Indians, ecophiliacs, still-colonized peoples, workers, the impoverished, homosexuals, and even some psychiatrists, athletes, retirees, sociologists, and librarians"--it was incumbent that collection-development specialists acquire materials that spoke to the various impulses for "liberation" (pp. 345-346).
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